Road To The Bottle with Alice Boman
After trekking all over the states on her way to Chicago, Alice Boman makes one last stop in the US just for us before going back to her native Sweden for the European leg of her tour.She and her bandmates have gotten to see some great sights along the way, including a very memorable trip to the Hotel Chelsea while in NY. “We were kinda starstruck just by seeing that building,” Boman said of laying eyes on the legendary landmark.Alice Boman feels like a deeply personal secret, a secret that is delicate and precious. You ache to share it, but fear sharing it with the world. This is all odd considering Alice’s work is no secret at all. She’s actually been receiving a ton of national coverage for her two shatteringly beautiful EPs, both out on Adrien Recordings and the gentle videos that accompany them.It was an unlikely series of events that led Boman to her label. Boman sent a few songs, recorded at home, that she considered demos to a studio to inquire about the cost of recording time. The employee who received them liked them so much that he sent them along to Adrien Recordings. If not for that simple connection, we may never have heard these beautiful songs as they are.Words like “ethereal,” “haunting,” “ghostly,” and “intimate” end up being thrown around a lot in regards to Boman’s music. However, those fail to capture her entirely. You’re just as likely to encounter a word like “powerful” to describe the way she manages to craft a warm, sonic room that leave the listener shivering.It’s incredible the way Boman is able to break your heart with just her voice, piano, and the occasional bit of guitar. In 2014, when those instruments have seemingly been mined for all they’re worth, it is artists like Boman injecting not just humanity into them, but nature that allows them to continue living.Skisser, Swedish for “sketches,” is a perfect name for her first EP. Many of the songs have that feeling – they don’t feel like they start or end so much as they float across you. Like flipping through someone else’s sketchbook, their raw beauty is unparalleled in its honesty because they truly were recordings intended only for their creator. If you’re like us, you will find yourself hitting replay over and over again. The songs almost force the listener to, because as they end, it is hard to imagine listening to anything else. It seems likely that no matter how many people are here Saturday, the crowd will demand an encore.“You know I need the darkness / as much as I need the light,” Boman sings. An arbitrary line that could easily sound cliché or stilted in another artist’s hands instead feels like something you’ve always known. It also serves as an excellent parallel to the story of her work being released to the public. Everything that we have of Boman, we almost never saw as it is.Although she came on the scene in 2013, news outlets such as HuffingtonPost, NPR (TWICE), Rookie, The Guardian (TWICE), and even our own city's Chicagoist have all taken note of Boman in the past year and I’m sure they won’t be the last. The always impressive and haunting CIRCUIT DES YEUX opens the show with a stark, chilling live show that’ll leave you aching for more. Tickets are only $8 and the show starts at around 7pm.